Autumn 2017

Tuesday, December 5

Swetha Kumar

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), many IoT systems are adopting cloud services for back-end processing. All major cloud service providers are offering various appealing services to ease the development and management of cloud-based IoT systems. In order to securely use these cloud services, IoT devices must be authenticated and authorized to perform selected communication activities in a secured way. Although authentication and authorization process has been made much easier nowadays, it is still challenging for resource-constrained IoT devices to establish reliable connection with remote cloud services. The challenges include obtaining and storing security certificates, and maintaining secure pub-sub communication relationships. In addition, system administrators need to manually handle the security and functional aspects of the requests from IoT devices thus posing complications. To tackle these challenges, in this project, we propose a design of IoT device management service, which can run on smart gateways. Leveraging this service, near-automatic authentication and authorization process can be realized between a gateway and its connected nearby IoT devices. The implementation details of cloud services offered by different providers can be hidden from IoT devices, and the energy and communication burden on resource-constrained IoT devices can be released significantly. The proposed service has been implemented and tested with Amazon Web Services as the back-end, and its functions have been released as sets of RESTful APIs for IoT device and system administrators to use.